Abby Schachter: Searching for a Star-Spangled Minivan

'Buy American' isn't as easy as it used to be. Then there's also the 'buy right-to-work state' urge.

By

Abby W. Schachter

Feb. 11, 2013 7:13 p.m. ET

When I was a child in the 1970s, my father was committed to buying only an American car. It was the patriotic thing to do, Dad said. We want to help the U.S. economy, he explained. So we had a blue Oldsmobile Omega for nearly a decade and a gray Oldsmobile Calais for years after that.

Dad's car choices probably weren't all that unusual at the time—except for the fact that we were Canadian. It was years before my parents actually moved to the U.S., so my father's American patriotism is all the more powerful to me as I think back on it today.

I was reminded of this recently as my husband and I embarked on buying a new car. We're in the market for either a minivan or an SUV crossover that has three rows of seats. I want to make a patriotic purchase, but it's not as simple as it used to be. Many more calculations go into figuring out what's the most good-for-America car than were needed a few decades ago.

Consider the gradations of virtue in buying American. There are Japanese models that are built in the U.S., so it may actually help the U.S. economy just as much or more to buy a Honda built in Indiana as it would to buy a Chrysler built in Italy. But then there is the question of where in the U.S. the car was built. I am much more supportive of right-to-work states than I am of union-monopolized states, so on that basis isn't it more pro-American to buy a Toyota built in Alabama than a General Motors vehicle from Michigan?

ENLARGE

A 1941 Oldsmobile 4-door sedan.
Associated Press

Then there's the problem of buying a vehicle produced by either of the two American auto companies that took U.S. government bailouts. Millions of taxpayers are never getting their money back. In December, news emerged that taxpayers would lose as much as $20 billion on their forced "investment" in GM.

As a supporter of free markets, I reject the need for government bailouts in the first place. But the Detroit rescue by the Troubled Asset Relief Program was a bad deal from start to finish. Nonunion employees and contractors got clobbered as did bondholders, and in the end the Obama administration is accepting pennies on the dollar in repayments just to be able to score political points by declaring, as Vice President Joe Biden kept crowing on the campaign trail, "GM is alive." All this has also been a good thing for the United Auto Workers, but that isn't necessarily the same as being good for the rest of America.

This leaves us with Ford, which deserves support from car buyers like me for declining the TARP bailout. Yet there again, it isn't so simple. First, Ford was founded by a notorious anti-Semite, which is probably why my father bought Oldsmobiles all those years ago. Next, the cars are manufactured in a number of places other than the U.S., including Canada, Mexico, Turkey and Venezuela. Not to mention that the places in the U.S. where Fords are built include some of those nasty union-dominated states we disqualified earlier.

All these knotty considerations aside, though, I'm convinced that no matter what my husband and I buy, it will be a patriotic purchase. Not because of the company, make or model, but simply because we need such a big car in the first place: God willing, we will be a family of six come August. As Jonathan V. Last argues in his new book, "What to Expect When No One's Expecting," the country has a serious baby drought, with potentially dire consequences. The country needs families to have more kids to replenish the workforce, strengthen the economy, and expand the pool of future taxpayers.

Yet my husband and I don't feel that our brand of baby-patriotism is much appreciated or rewarded by Washington. The tax code isn't doing enough to encourage having more kids. And parents thinking of expanding their families must take into consideration financial matters like paying for government-mandated car seats. As Mr. Last argues, the expense of car seats (and the room they take up!) isn't the determining factor in a couple's decision to limit the number of children they have, but it sure doesn't help.

One comfort, as my husband and I shop for cars, is the knowledge that even if the one we pick doesn't meet all of my patriotic specifications, at least we'll be filling it with an above-replacement-rate number of young Americans.

Ms. Schachter is a frequent contributor to the pop-culture blog Acculturated.

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